The “Internet of Things” (IoT) refers to internetworked physical devices that are embedded with electronics, software, and other system components that enable the objects to collect, exchange and process data. Such devices include not only computers, but phones, appliances (refrigerators, washers, dryers, etc.), security monitoring equipment, health monitoring equipment, gaming devices, and any other device for which interconnectivity may be utilized. As more appliance and home devices of the IoT are added to residential and commercial properties, bandwidth for device traffic for these devices becomes competitive. This may result in delays, dropped packets, and device processing errors.
Some network linking devices, such as routers or gateways, allow users to prioritize traffic among devices. For example, device addresses, such as MAC addresses or even IP addresses, can be selected and traffic priorities for those devices. However, many users do not know how to manage network liking devices to implement such manual prioritization schemes. Moreover, those users that can prioritize device traffic on local networks within a residence or a building must, by much trial and error, implement multiple different prioritization schemes to determine which one provides an optimized quality of service (QoS) for particular devices without adversely impacting the QoS of other devices. Additions of devices to a network may require re-prioritization of traffic, which, in turn, leads to periods of inefficient network bandwidth utilization.